Doris Schöttler-Boll (born 3 January 1945 in Noerdlingen; died 29 January 2015 in Essen) was a German artist.[1] She is known for her de-constructivist works that she initially described as a result of Photomontage and Collage.

Having graduated at the Folkwang academy, she continued her professional education at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf art academy) as a student of Joseph Beuys from 1970 till 1974. Simultaneously she was a key rent strike activist in Bochum, and worked as an artist with the children of the people of the large ‘Girondelle’ tenement house who were continuing their rent-strike. She was bringing paper and crayons or water colors and encouraged the children to express their wishes and longings visually.

When she had completed her studies at the Düsseldorf art academy, Doris Schöttler-Boll went to Paris with her husband who was a student and a translator of Louis Althusser. Since the mid-1970s, she met Jacques Derrida, Pierre Macherey, Étienne Balibar and Louis Althusser, being occasionally invited to their homes together with Peter Schöttler.

Before she went to Paris, she wrote Derrida that she was compelled to ‘steal’ his concept of deconstruction because it amounted to reductionism if she would describe her way of working simply as collage/montage.[3] It was then, in the mid-1970s, that she started to work as a professional (‘free’ and ‘free-lance’) artist; something she continues to do.

A professional artist, curator, and feminist art teacher in Bremen[edit]

In 1979, Doris Schöttler-Boll went to Bremen, working as an artist but also teaching art and art-related subjects at the University of Bremen from 1979 to 1986. Her courses and exhibitions focused largely on feminist and civil rights issues. An art project and parallel course focused on gender culminated in an exhibition titled Hair – Or Looking for Traces of the Female(Haare, oder Spurensuche des Weiblichen).

The courses on Women and Art (Frauen und Kunst) led to an exhibition with the same title (Frauen und Kunst, 1982) in the Weserburg, as well as a small catalogue.[5] Since this point, Doris Schöttler-Boll, who collaborated with noted artists, has worked with children, housewives, students and budding artists.

In 1985, Doris Schöttler-Boll was invited to stay in Essen as Artist-in-residence. Here, she lived and worked in Borbeck castle (Schloss Borbeck).[6] During her time in Borbeck she organized the exhibition "Unter einem Himmel (Beneath one and the same sky, 1988)," which received considerable media attention.[7] The exhibition featured two artists at a time, a male and a female artist who shared aesthetic interests. The male/female juxtaposition was expected to let the public discover gender-specific traits in their work. Nan Hoover (1931–2008) exhibited together with Harald Falkenhagen, Doris Schöttler-Boll with Timm Ulrichs. Other participants were Tony Morgan, Eu Nim Ro, Norbert Schwontkowski, Toto Frima, etc.

In the summer of 1988, the jury (Atelier-Vergabegremium) of the municipal Museum Folkwang in Essen decided to give Doris Schöttler-Boll a specific form of support that had been awarded already to HA Schult and Herbert Lungwitz: a rent-free, timewise unlimited stay in a municipal ‘art house’ (Atelierhaus). Schult had been given a space at the former Kaiser Otto School. Schöttler-Boll was offered a space at the former Pestalozzi School. This ‘Atelier’ House had been a home for the sculptor Lungwitz “since the (early) 1980s.”[8] She renovated the studio, and the space where she lives, at her own expenses and pays for heating and water only.[9] But in return for the benefit of being a recipient of such support for artists (Kuenstlerfoerderung), she is very actively engaged in conceiving and organizing projects open to the public, most notably a series of presentations titled “Persons-Projects-Perspectives’ (since 9/9/1999).[10]

Since 1996 Doris Schöttler-Boll has been a member of the Westdeutsche Künstlerbund, the Federation of West German Artists.

In addition to her creative work, Doris Schöttler-Boll has been conceiving, organizing and curating art-related projects at the Atelierhaus für Kunst, Medien und Kommunication (Art house for the visual arts, media and communication) in Essen-Steele. She initiated and curated expositions of young and not so young artists, was the prime mover of art projects involving children and adolescents and invited such noted artists as Harun Farocki, Urs Jaeggi, D. E. Sattler etc. to present their ideas, talk about their work, and engage in debate with the public.[11] These presentations (under the general title "Persons, Projects, Perspectives") focused on painting, film, literature, art theory and practice, the possibilities of "intervention" in society, the social situation of artists and the circumstances which further or negatively affect the creation of art.[12]

In August and September, 1987, Doris Schöttler-Boll had a noted solo exhibition at the Landesmuseum Bonn (the main museum of modern art in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany). The exhibition, entitled Dekonstruktionen oder vom Widersprechen in Bildern (Dekonstructions or Contradicting by way of images), was curated by Professor Klaus Honnef, an art historian focused on photo art / art photography.[13]

Subsequently, she also had solo-exhibitions at the Clemens-Sels-Museum in Neuss (the twin city of Düsseldorf, on the left bank of the Rhine) and at the Museum Bochum in Bochum, Germany.

Other exhibitions (solo or group exhibitions) took place at the Kunstamt Neukoelln (Berlin), the Fotoforum Bremen (Bremen), the Steintorgalerie (Bremen), the Weserburg museum (Bremen), the Museum Ehrenhof (Düsseldorf), the Museum Gelsenkirchen (Gelsenkirchen), the Studio of Schloss Oberhausen (Oberhausen), the Stollwerkfabrik (Cologne), etc.

Professor Klaus Honnef, a noted expert on photography as an art form, presented a large solo exhibition of her work in Bonn, West Germany.[18] Josef Beuys wrote about her artistic approach that it avoids both rigid Aestheticism and one-sided political statement. The merit of such an approach was considerable in his opinion.[19]

Commenting on her works exhibited in 1987 in the Bonn Landesmuseum, Prof. Klaus Honnef explained that Schöttler-Boll “is aware of the secret seductive power of photography, which ‘we put our faith in,’ as André Bazin wrote. She knows about this fascination and yet, she does not succumb to it. But she does not high-handedly assume to possess that Archimedean theorem or position which would allow her to expose the illusionary quality of photographic worlds of images. She knows, after all, that these worlds reflect social existence and consciousness.” Honnef noted that the artist had made use of “fragments of commercial imagery” (Versatzstücke kommerzieller Bilderwelten) when she created the works chosen for the exhibition. “She relies on collage and montage and takes a photo of the result in order to close the gaps in the surface. Despite the fact that she uses a pair of scissors to destroy the original material, she never proceeds in an aggressive manner.”[20]

Prof. Marianne Schuller discussed the assemblage that Schöttler-Boll had completed for the Grillo-Theater (rebuilt and modernized by the architect Werner Ruhnau). Schöttler-Boll’s work is dedicated to two tragic German dramatists, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), a Prussian citizen driven to suicide by an utterly wrong socio-cultural reality, and Georg Büchner (1813–1837), the author of Woyzeck (an almost surreal play about a recruit driven nuts by superiors who finally ends up murdering the young woman he loves) – but also the author of the ‘Hessische Landbote (The Hessian Courier),’ a revolutionary pamphlet addressed to the poor of the countryside that was circulated anonymously in the Hessian region. Her work consists of several photo-collages & montages that are placed above the left entrance of the auditorium. Prof. Schuller writes that the images constituting this work (a work of related yet separate parts!) “do not visualize the invisible; they do not replace something that is missing in the texts / the writing” of playwrights. “I rather see in these works as such something that is invisible. It comes to light as a kind of grieving, which these images represent, and which becomes acute while we look at them.”[21]

Dietrich E. Sattler, a poet, critic and editor of the ‘historisch-kritische Hoelderlin-Ausgabe,’ a new, thorough edition of the collected works of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), wrote about one of her works, “The moment represented” in the work “never was nor will it ever be. The same is true of the (represented) space; it exists and does not exist. … This is the camera obscura by way of which the dream nests in the day. The strange space where this happens is the interstice (Zwischenraum). The time in which this happens is the ‘time in-between’ (Zwischenzeit). In this case, the camera obscura is nothing but the technical apparatus necessary for the simulation of the dream. It is the artificial enclave of night within day… We admire the intelligence of the artist who spurned the possibility to satisfy our expectations with deceptive surrogates of real light and who presented to us the conditions inside the peepshow box, as if she could destroy the illusion and dissolve the magic of the representational image which alienates us from living images…”[22]

^See her short biography in several issues of the konkursbuch, a feminist journal focused on art and literature, edited by Claudia Gehrke, notably issues 20, 1988 on ‘The Sexual, Women and Art’ and issue 12, 1984 on ‘WomenPOWER.

^The exhibition was curated by Horst Mueller, Rose Pfister and Jens Weyers. It took place in the Städtische Galerie Bremen (Municipal Gallery Bremen), Buntentorsteinweg 112, D-28201 Bremen. See website of the municipal gallery: [www.staedtischegalerie-bremen.de]

^See: J. Weidenfels, listed in the SEE ALSO section further below. - Weidenfels also quotes Prof. Marianne Schuller : "Doris Schöttler-Boll radikalisiert das Prinzip der Collage." (Doris Schöttler-Boll found for herself a radical way to utilize the concept of collage.)